October 16th I ran the Detroit Free Press half marathon.  The plan was to take a little break after that to clear my head.  And so I did.

This week I started training again in earnest.  I know – 7 weeks does not a ‘little break’ make, right?

Years ago a friend and I planned on training for and running the Free Press marathon the following year, giving us 15 months to whip our bodies into shape.  In typical (for the time) fashion I started too aggressively, injured myself, and bailed before I ever really got started.  I remember this series of events for a couple reasons:

1. A plan should be just that – saying you’re going to do something doesn’t make it happen.
2. Trying to do too much, too fast is the shortest way to doing nothing at all (apart from, you know, doing nothing at all to start with).

This time around, my approach to fitness has been modeled as a reflection of my understanding of these points.  When I started running again in 2009, I started slowly (infuriatingly slowly, in fact) and followed a plan.  I did not push through injury – I modified the plan to account for the limitations it imposed.  I listened to my body and made incremental progress toward the goal.  And, in large part, I have been successful.

I mention all this for a very simple reason.  I find myself a scant 18 weeks from my planned first marathon having not run for 7 weeks.  WTF?  Have I learned nothing?  Or is it just this event – a marathon – that causes me so much consternation that I feel it necessary to sabotage myself?

I’m overstating this, I know.  I’m following a 16 week training program which progresses fairly slowly for the first few weeks, ultimately giving me about 7 weeks to ramp up before getting into the real meat of it.  I guess I’m just frustrated that I’ve waited so long to get started in the first place.

I will say this, too.  I haven’t taken this much time off since starting this adventure, so I haven’t had the opportunity to really feel the degradation of endurance that accompanies 7 weeks off.  I ran a couple times last week, at very low effort, and chaulked up the difficulty I experienced to my recovering from a light chest cold.  This week, running now for real (albeit still pretty slowly), I found out just how far I’d fallen.  A 3 mile run, which a few short weeks ago would have constituted a recovery run, was a major undertaking.  And I thought I’d need hospitalization after the 30 minute cross-training bike ride I did the next day.

Here’s what I know: I stopped exercising for 7 weeks, gained some weight, and lost a whole bunch of endurance.  That said, I neither gained nor lost everything, and I have a plan that will ultimately carry me over the finish line of my first marathon.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few 12-minute miles to run